When many observers think of Korea today, missile tests and their effect on the world's geopolitical stability come to mind. But for one group of international researchers currently at work on the volatile peninsula, it's young Korean children stricken with terrible communication difficulties, who exhibit strange, obsessive behaviours, that warrant closer attention.

The past decade has seen an unprecedented degree of activity in the research of autism spectrum disorders in Britain and the US, where more than $100m (£50.7m) in new research grants has been made available in the past year alone for investigating this still-baffling neurological malady.

And most researchers will argue that tangible results in understanding the condition have been achieved through the work, including a consensus that unknown genetic factors are its primary cause, and that its incidence is much higher than once thought.

Asian research

But successfully arguing for the new models of autism's wide prevalence and roots in human genes requires wider evidence from global sources. With this in mind, a growing number of researchers this year began fanning out across the Asian continent to collect new data and fine-tune their research tools in countries including China, India, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.

The first academic cab off the rank has been a pilot project in South Korea led by a Washington anthropologist, Roy Richard Grinker, who has just published a new book on autism, and Young shin Kim, a Korean-born child psychiatrist? They have been joined by Eric Fombonne, the Canadian scholar responsible for the landmark epidemiological study which established that one in 166 young Britons are afflicted.

Already the hurdles are becoming apparent. For one thing, autism research in Asia, with the exception of Japan, has been generally non-existent. But outside researchers are finding other barriers to their efforts, including a strong resistance to the emerging scholarly consensus in the Anglo-American world on autism's prevalence and causes among many of their Asian counterparts.

Michael Hong, a professor of psychiatry at Seoul National University, who is sometimes described as South Korea's founding father of child psychiatry, is among those Asian researchers who dispute the growing consensus, arguing that autism is not nearly as prevalent as western researchers believe, perhaps afflicting just one youngster in every 10,000.

Hong argues that behaviour that is often labelled as autism is rather a largely environmentally caused disorder that mimics autism, known as reactive attachment disorder, the cause of which is largely the fault of the children's mothers, who have been buffeted about by the winds of cultural change sweeping east Asia.

Those researchers are not only challenging Hong's hard-earned reputation, they are also flying in the face of culturally embedded Korean notions about the role of women and the nature of parenting. "It's seen as a disease that impugns the whole family," explains Grinker, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University.

The work of Grinker's seven-member team of investigators was made possible through a $120,000 grant from the New York-based Autism Speaks, a non-profit group with offices in Britain and America. The organisation has pledged $13m in new funding during the past year for studies such as the two-year-long South Korean venture, which will screen, assess and analyse data collected in Ilsan, a city of 200,000 near the capital, Seoul, in order to work out the country's autism prevalence. With its low labour costs and well-established medical networks, South Korea seemed a particularly inviting prospect for such a study, whose design has been modelled on the landmark British effort in Stafford.

The new data will test the trustworthiness of existing estimates, which are based on US and British surveys of their respective populations. They will test whether those previous studies could have contained any in-built bias towards the Anglo-American situation. If, say, the incidence of autism in South Korea were found to be much lower than existing western studies suggest, the implications for British research could be tremendous.

Grinker doesn't think that will happen. But, like Hong and Leo Kanner, the child psychiatrist who first described autism in 1943, he once believed that autism was a rare disorder. When his 15-year-old daughter, Isabel, was first diagnosed with the condition, in 1994, he knew almost nothing about it.

Grinker says he has strived to improve his own knowledge and that of academia at large. During the same period, autism has surged into the popular consciousness on the back of a tidal wave of media coverage, parental activism and widely published findings showing that the condition once thought to affect as few as one in 10,000 children - Leo Kanner's number - affected as many as six in every 1,000.

The results of Grinker's academic quest were published this month in Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, which includes a long section detailing the Korean experience. "Illusory" academic ideas about autism, he complains, both reflect and shape the contemporary South Korean child psychiatry scene.

Blaming the mother

In such a setting, reactive attachment disorder is a popular diagnosis, Grinker believes, because the condition simply blames the mother: "That's the more culturally appropriate diagnosis, you see, because it means there's just this one person - the mother - who's to blame."

Kyung-jin Cho, a South Korean anthropologist involved with the project, says the researchers' initial screenings are interested in identifying symptoms, which will then be considered as part of a lengthy procedure based on the best scientific understanding about the malady.

Young shin Kim, an assistant professor at Yale University's School of Medicine and the project's other principal investigator, complains about the "shared ignorance" about autism, in a country served by just 70 trained child psychiatrists.

Along with her colleagues, Kim points out that it has only been the new, higher and more accurate prevalence rates that have, in Britain and America, produced more and better educational services, earlier diagnosis, better treatment, less social stigma; indeed, just about everything children with autism need. When a prevalence rate is finally generated for South Korea, this could be the case there, too.

"That's the reason we're doing the study," she says. "Children with autism-spectrum disorders in Korea have every right to live their life and be happy, too. And their Korean mothers and fathers need to have every opportunity to overcome fear and discrimination."